Rurik’s latest –the first post on the IVAW’s Winter Soldier Investigation. It’s priceless when a student/expert of Russian history puts it in perspective for us.

Send in the Clones

Malkin has the schedule.…this is the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion.

Highlights:

Blockade the IRS at 8 am with War Resisters League, CODEPINK and friends at 12th and Constitution Ave.

Disrupt the War Profiteers with No War, No Warming, PeaceAction, Student Peace Action Network (SPAN), Campus Anti-War Network, and a whole host of student groups who are planning a variety of creative actions using nonviolent civil disobedience, mobile teams and delegations to offices in the K St. Corridor.

Self-Guided Monopoly Board Walking Tour will provide opportunities to creatively communicate with the War Profiteers in the K St. Corridor Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Bechtel, the IMF/World Bank, the American Enterprise Institute, and lobbyists and lawyers for many, many more!

Separate Oil and State at the American Petroleum Institute in the early morning with No War, No Warming.

The unhinged moonbattery seems to be neverending.

Veterans March for Peace will gather on the Mall at 7th Street at 9 AM.

I’ll bet members of IVAW will be with them.

Critical Mass: Kick the Oil Addiction that Fuels the War. We will ride around the city focusing on specific areas that support the war as well as riding by other actions to show our solidarity. We will meet in Dupont Circle at 5:30 pm and leave around 6pm. Please come with costumes or signs about no oil.

Granny Peace Brigade Knit-In: The Grannies will as they knit stump socks for soldiers returning from Iraq & Afghanistan with amputated limbs to draw attention to this virtual epidemic among Iraq veterans.and the lack of care provided our veterans.

Funk the War: Student Power Dance Party Against Empire with Students for a Democratic Society, Baltimore Algebra Project, and Our Spring Break in a dance party in the streets, touring the war profiteers, recruiters and media sites in the K St corridor.

It makes one want to vomit…but it’s probably one of the reasons why they disappeared after Winter Soldier II…

Speaking of which, I wonder what Knappenberger is doing. It appears his blog, the Wobbly Nomad is missing?

No it’s not. It’s still there.

The Mad Tech is back! wooot!

After moving his lovely family from Arizona to Chicago…!

Go over and say “hi”.

From Jake and Michelle.

QiblaLocator confirms Mecca orientation of Flight 93 crescent

Reader Max K. found another Islamic website with a Mecca-direction calculator. It can be used to construct yet another graphical demonstration that the Flight 93 memorial points to Mecca.

Muslims face Mecca for prayer, with the direction to Mecca calculated by the great circle method. Enter your street address into the search field at QiblaLocator.com and it brings up a Google map with a red line showing the Muslim prayer-direction (or “qibla”) from your home.

At the Flight 93 crash site, Skyline Road passes through the center of what is to become the giant central crescent of the planned memorial. Enter “Skyline Rd, Shanksville PA” into the QiblaLocator search box and it generates this map:

Red line points to Mecca. (Azimuth, also in red: 55.19° clockwise from north.)

To see how this direction to Mecca compares with the orientation of the planned memorial, first impose some orientation lines on the Crescent of Embrace design:

The short black line connects the two most protruding tips of the half-mile wide central crescent. The long black arrow shows the orientation of a person standing between the crescent tips and facing into the center of the crescent. (Every particle of this original design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign, which only disguises the giant crescent with a few additional trees.)

Next just lay the site-plan graphic on top of QiblaLocator’s Google map:

The red and black lines are almost parallel.

To be precise, the upper crescent tip is the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall, Entry Portal Wall. The bottom crescent tip is the last pair of red maple trees at the bottom end of the crescent walkway. Connect these tips, and the perpendicular bisector (black arrow) points 53.5° clockwise from north (within two degrees of the exact direction to Mecca).

A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. The Flight 93 Memorial will be the world’s largest mosque.

Earlier Mecca direction graphics

In 2005, Sarah Wells constructed a somewhat similar graphic. She used the Mecca direction calculator at Islam.com to get a qibla line that she superimposed onto the memorial site plan:

Green “qibla” circle shows direction to Mecca from nearby Pittsburgh. Again you can see that a person standing between the tips of the crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca.

Sarah’s graphic and the QiblaLocator graphic both demonstrate that the giant crescent points to Mecca in the way that Muslims define the direction to Mecca (by the “great circle” or “shortest distance” method).

The first graphic to show the Mecca orientation of the crescent memorial was posted by the pseudonymous Eaotin Shrdlu on September 10, 2005, two days after the crescent design was unveiled:

The large map projection and the small site-plan inset both have north at the top. Etaoin’s graphic shows that direction to Mecca from crash site (green line) and direction of person facing into crescent (red line) are the same.

University of Pennsylvania Professor Tim Baird, a member of the Flight 93 Advisory Commission, says that everyone involved in the Memorial Project is fully aware of the factual accuracy of the Mecca direction claim. Nevertheless, they all stand by as Project spokesmen keep denying the Mecca orientation in the newspapers. The Project even found an academic fraud to tell the press that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round. (Pittsburgh Post Gazette, August 18, 2007.)

Any Muslim would have denied this absurdity, but the Post Gazette does not want Griffith’s fraud exposed, because the Gazette itself has been fully complicit in covering up the Mecca orientation of the memorial since 2005. Post Gazette reporter Paula Ward told Alec Rawls in 2006 (download 3, p. 108) that editors and reporters at the Post Gazette saw all of the demonstrations of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent back in 2005 and made a top level editorial decision not to publish this explosive information. Editor Tom Birdsong thinks it would hurt the Democrats, so he is not going to publish it, and neither are other newspapers.

This shouldn’t be a right-left issue, but try telling our newspaper editors that. Which leaves it up to the rest of us to get the word out about Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism in the Flight 93 Memorial. This is going to have to be passed person to person.

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